::blows dust off profile:: Well shit, has it really been four years since I've updated this thing? Hello, Internet. How you been?

I loooove building and playing with Elder Dragon Highlander decks. (It's called Commander now, but it'll always be EDH in my heart.) If you know what I'm talking about, poke at me--if you show me your decklists, I'll show you mine. I love playing with good-natured people who pull crazy moves, because rest assured I will try to pull crazy moves on you. Good-naturedly.

Other salient facts about me:

I'm a big ole pushover, despite my crusty, cussy exterior. I'm not as smart as I like to think I am. I have a strong skeptical streak; "Science: It works, bitches" is one of the best catch-phrases ever. I am savagely thundertitted, and all my sweaters confirm this fact. I don't like being poked with sharp sticks, but then, I'm not sure who does; however, now that I've brought it up, I'm sure I'll be able to find thousands of pointy-stick-poking fetishists on the Internet.

Speaking of which: I love fucking around on the Internet. I love doing it almost as much as I love doing your mom.

I have left several Advanced User Features undocumented here, but then I wouldn't want to shock your delicate constitution.

I used to be the number 1 Google search result for the exact phrase "I'm curtains." It used to be a weird point of pride. And then I made this profile viewable only by people logged into OkCupid. So much for that ambition.

I am a flava explosion, bitch, and you better like it.

Assistantly managing a nerd store. Creating the occasional ruckus. Fucking your shit up. Making you like it.

I am ridiculously good at being verbose.

I am not so good at being concise.

I am going to attempt the latter in this one section, just for a change of pace.

For some strange reason, people tend to assume I'm either vegan or vegetarian when they first meet me. Then I scarf down a whole pound of bloody-rare ribeye in one sitting as they watch in horrified wonder. When my hair is really short, there also seems to be a presumption of dykiness, which pleases me a great deal, because dykey girls with really short hair are hot.

I like a wide enough variety of things that my long list of loves will usually inspire both admiration and disgust in most people.

So:

Books: I read and love a lot of different genres, from scientific non-fiction to children's books to romance novels to historical fiction to SF/F. My lists are long and tiresome; if you want to know more, message me and we can squee over favorite books indefinitely, because I love me some book talkery. Law school did burn me out a bit on reading, so I mostly read graphic novels these days.

Music: Here are some names--names that I'm typing using my computer's keyboard; names that will then be stored on a server thousands of miles away from me; names that will sooner or later be called up and displayed on your screen; names that you'll be reading shortly. Electrons are pretty fucking cool, aren't they?

Annuals, Andrew Bird, Bat for Lashes, Menomena, Lemon Jelly, Genesis, Ratatat, Belle and Sebastian, The Black Keys, Islands, Broken Social Scene, Röyksöpp, Télépopmusik, Radiohead, Boards of Canada, Four Tet, Band of Horses, Wolf Parade, Beck, The Decemberists, PJ Harvey, Bloc Party, Blur, Interpol, The Shins, Rogue Wave, Underworld, John Vanderslice, Broadcast, The Crystal Skulls, Stars, Feist, Silversun Pickups, Sufjan Stevens, Nada Surf, Good News for People Who Love Bad News, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Yankee Foxtrot Hotel, OK Go's Oh No, Jurassic 5, old-school funk and hip hop, The Local Division, Komeda, A.C. Newman, Kaiser Chiefs, Fiona Apple, Regina Spektor, Basement Jaxx, Mogwai, Cut Chemist, Troublemakers, Neutral Milk Hotel, Grandaddy, The Magnetic Fields, The Postal Service, Iron and Wine, The Kinks, The Beatles, Electric 6, MC Chris, Franz Ferdinand, Swingle Singers.

Composers: The top four are JS Bach, Beethoven, Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky. When it comes to Dead White Composer music, I seem to go for either terrifyingly precise and mathematical, or big and emotional and messy. I'm currently working on getting to know more Ravel and Prokofiev.

Performers: Glenn Gould, Murray Perahia, Arcadi Volodos, Artur Rubinstein, Nigel Kennedy, Jascha Heifetz.

Movies: Some random titles that I really enjoyed and/or thought were particularly excellent: (500) Days of Summer, The Wrestler, Black Swan, No Country for Old Men, The Avengers Movie, Wall-E, The Dark Knight, Ong Bak, Dog Day Afternoon, Pan's Labyrinth, Capote, The Prestige, The Royal Tenenbaums, Jacob's Ladder, Buffalo 66, A Nightmare Before Christmas, Snatch, Yojimbo, Requiem for a Dream, Sin City, Igby Goes Down, Donnie Darko, Spirited Away, Best in Show, This is Spinal Tap, Harold and Maude, Trainspotting, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Adaptation, Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Transporter, Dead Poets' Society and Cowboy Bebop: Knocking on Heaven's Door

When I get the opportunity to catch up on TV shows via DVD, I enjoy watching Battlestar Galactica, Supernatural, Samurai Champloo, Cowboy Bebop, Sealab 2021, The Office (I've only seen the British version), The Simpsons, Futurama, Harvey Birdman: Attorney At Law, Firefly, Scrubs and Monty Python.

Foods: I enjoy all sorts of cuisines; I refuse to pick a favorite. I will say that when I cook, I make a lot of shit from scratch. Angel food cake, pies, quiche, chicken stock, etc. Do not utter "Why don't you just use a cake mix?" in my presence. I WILL CUT YOU. I HAVE VERY SHARP KNIVES. I am Anthony Bourdain's bitch; his Les Halles Cookbook is just about as close to a kitchen bible as it gets for me. What? I'm wayyy better at French cooking than Chinese. I leave the Chinese cooking to my boyfriends (who've so far all been white, ha). It's worked in the past, and I see no reason to change this.

I also have an unhealthy love for processed meat products like ham, hot dogs and Spam, though I don't allow myself to indulge very often. If it has smoke flavoring, I'll eat it, even if I know it's heinous. I blame my mom.

1. People to interact with.

2. Something alive and fuzzy and warm to love and talk to and take care of.

3. Something for my brain to chew over and digest, or material for it to shake and worry and occasionally pummel into submission--text is excellent for this, but moving pictures and conversations work as well.

4. Something to keep my ears happy.

5. A spoon. What's with people using forks to eat rice? That's just weird.

6. Your mom.

Cats. (The thought pattern generally goes: HOLY SHIT A KITTY. You're the best kitty. You're the fattest fuzziest kitty. You're the--ow ow pokey bits pokey bits ow.) Magic: the Gathering gameplay and theory. Food and food prep. Girls. Boys. Pleasing butt shapes. Flirting. Boundaries. What it means to live a wholehearted life. How to let go of shit. How to hold on to the good stuff. Narrative, narrativity, storytelling, and how that intersects with memory, experience and history. Race. Gender. Gender presentation. Sexual identity. Sexual preference. Science and scientific rigor. Music and music theory. Pop cultural representations of all of the above. Post-modernism. (People who dismiss it as pure bullshit don't actually understand its core concepts.) My crazy dreams, like the one I had the other day in which I'm a werewolf hunter who's being sabotaged from within by a traitor who keeps sending me out into fights in non-werewolf proof gear. The dream ends with me lying in bed, staring at the ceiling of my bedroom as it flushes blood-red from the reflected sunset outside, trying to grasp for the last strands of my memory and my personality, knowing that once I lose those strands, I'll become a werewolf, too.

My dreams tend to be really goddamn intense.

Never forget: I'm the Original Flavor Queen of Useless, Random Speculation. Don't fall for the Cherry or Diet variations. Their advertising campaigns are slick and shiny, sure, but they always leave this bizarre aftertaste on the back of your tongue. It's quite unpleasant.

Plotting mayhem and molestation. This night may or may not be the night the shaved gerbils dread the most. I'll never tell, and neither will they. But if you're really curious, allow me to point you towards my journal, where I used to record my Typical Friday Nights.

Many people point out that if something is typed out for all the Internets to read, then it's no longer private, is it? My response is, this space is reserved for the most private revelation you're willing to expose to the rapacious gaze of OKCupid users everywhere, which makes it a relative term. It doesn't need to be particularly private; thresholds will vary drastically from person to person. This is comparable to a person who can honestly assert that the tallest American girl he's ever dated is 5'1", which isn't particularly tall when compared to the average American female population.

Right, now that the semantics are done with, here's the most private thing I'm willing to admit here:

I'm curtains.

If you don't know what it means, I'm not explaining it to you. It'll just add to my delightful air of mystique.

Another private thing to admit here: Plumbing doesn't matter to me as much as I thought it did, though it matters a bit more than I'd like it to. I'm somewhere between 2.2 and e on the Kinsey Scale.

You're not afraid of being covered with a light sheen of cat hair. If you like tender-hearted geek girls with filthy mouths. If you enjoy going to rock shows, or dancing to old-school funk, or watching breakdancers at the Good Foot. If you're OK with conducting an entertaining but sporadic correspondence with a girl with too many things to cram into too little free time (and believe me, I'm an expert at cramming--just ask your mom HA HA ZIIIING). If you've noticed that I'm both a) seeing someone, and b) looking only for friends, and you're still interested in hanging out with me and aren't harboring some sort of "Dude, hook ups on the sly are HOT!" delusions. If you see that previous sentence and you don't somehow feel like reading all this text has been a complete waste of time because you wanted a sweet sweet sexy hookup and felt entitled to one because you were able to read a few hundred words of text. (A good third of my messages seem to be resentful messages from dudes who want me to know that I've deceived them, and WHAT GOOD WAS ALL THAT READING EFFORT NOW YOU DECEITFUL HARLOT. Those messages amuse me greatly. Which is why I'm still leaving this disclaimer at the very end.)